Perry Anderson's Regime Change

It's the neoliberalism, stupid . . .

Over the past year I’ve become more attentive to the London Review of Books. I subscribed at the request of my wife, who goes through books at an alarming rate. I also sub to the New York Review of Books, have read it intermittently for decades, but lately don’t find it commanding much of my attention.

An arresting article in the latest issue is by Perry Anderson, the prolific British historian. He sums up everything — world politics — in a way that I like, so I want to offer my own rehash.

The richer nations of Europe and North America are dominated politically by centrist configurations. In the U.S. there is a virtual two-party duopoly, reinforced by the electoral rules hard-wired into the U.S. Constitution.

Against these sclerotic political establishments are continuing economic disruptions which the establishments are unable to handle and that provoke populist rebellions on both the left and the right.

The inability stems in part from the devolution of economic theory towards uselessness, one of my pet peeves. The inability of macroeconomics to anticipate or cope with the Great Recession of 2008 is an old story. So too the inability of the leading academic macro models to deal with financial impacts on business cycles. Even private industry rejects that foolishness. The leading academic models fail a market test.

I like to point out that the leading lights of the U.S. economists’ community, what I call a self-perpetuating hierarchy, have been excluded from economic policy-making since 2020. Biden’s top economists were not identified with the academic elite of the profession, while now under Trump the top echelon is salted with a gang of certifiable cranks and toadies.

In the cases of political and intellectual hierarchy, sclerosis tends towards corruption. We could say that Republican sclerosis brought us to the current pass, which combines corruption with moronic economic policy. There is no lack of corruption on view today, but it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility before Trump.

Anderson identifies the three pillars of political establishments’ unpopularity:

1. Growing inequality, including what is now called “precarity,” the latter referring to the financial hazards that plague the non-rich (especially the rising costs of housing, health care, child care, and higher education). Bearing risk is more difficult with the decline of manufacturing jobs, really a veil for the ebb in the unionization that made those jobs desirable;

2. Corruption and the decline of political choice afforded the electorate, summed up as “oligarchy”;

3. The perceived, often misconceived, costs of immigration, and so-called “free trade” more generally.

The establishment failure to address inequality, indeed its intent to exacerbate it, is a feature of its economic ideology, described these days as neoliberalism. Recall that Ben Bernanke, a prince of the economics profession, described the pre-2008 situation as “the Great Moderation.” And it was no less than the avant-garde Barack Hussein Obama who turned a golden opportunity for progressive transformation, the 2008 collapse, into a consolidation of the old order. Remember he told a meeting of bankers that he stood between them and “the pitchforks.” Selling out the ‘Occupy’ movement and the Wisconsin workers were features, not bugs. Bill Clinton took a similar route in 1992, using a solid Congressional majority and economic distress to follow utterly conventional paths, after walking away from his promises to be critical of Bush the First’s “free trade” deal.

Re: #2 above, I would call the Democratic establishment’s blockade of left-liberal political forces, notably Bernie Sanders, as another type of corruption. Perhaps the grossest case was the administration of Andrew Cuomo in New York, who conspired to block Democratic Party control of the state legislature, but there are other examples. In theory the party higher-ups urge support for incumbents and the choices of Democratic voters in primaries. In practice, they make exceptions when it suits them.

On #3, the Republican side of our duopoly is committed to immigration that holds down wages. Both sides uphold free trade, which in practice as my friend Dean Baker emphasizes, combines free trade in common labor with protection of unfree trade in patents, copyrights, and highly-skilled labor.

Anderson seems tempted by a Marxian notion of inevitable economic collapse fomenting populist insurgencies. He and others like to point to burgeoning indebtedness. Color me skeptical. By now we know not to count on capitalism crashing down and leading to socialist revolution. Still, the instabilities and disruptions cause gross and widespread human misery in the richer nations. They count in politics.

I’ve resisted the labeling of the MAGAs as populist, but I can no longer do so. After all, there are ample precedents in U.S. history. And of course on the left there are Bernie Sanders and ‘The Squad.’ Both sides are animated by the three items above, but the Left is politically crippled by its inability to cope with #3, xenophobia, however morally creditable its weakness is. As Anderson notes, any compromise on #3 would amount to “moral suicide.”

There is also the international level to regime change, the one with which Anderson begins, about which I have less to say in this post. It pertains to Trump’s abandonment of Atlanticist doctrine, including U.S. support for NATO, in favor of regional blocks that harken back to Orwell’s Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia trichotomy. Trump wants to blow up NATO by grabbing Greenland from NATO member Denmark, and leaving Central Europe to Putin. Otherwise he is mostly oriented to dominion over the Western Hemisphere. My intuition is that he is only interested in Israel & Palestine, or Iran, insofar as they do not obstruct his higher priorities or command his attention.

The big hole in Anderson’s survey lies in its neglect of the rise of the economic juggernaut of the Peoples Republic of China, followed by the rest of East and South Asia. We could be in for an entirely different kind of regime.